After this video i can only say one thing. This thing really turned into a scam. Maybe not as big as some people make it out to be. But this shit alone proves it and if someone can deny it or some up with a valid factual counter argument please be me guest.
Yeah thats what i have been through right before i deleted my first account and started fucking with beet to “pay him back and show him how others feel” Like dafuq was i doing. Iam so glad i got out of this and now a while later woke up to the whole CIG thing and that the megafans are WAY worse. I expirienced some really crazy shit myself now because more than once fans tried to harm me outside of this subreddit in real life. The worst a crazy goon did is find my steam account and message spam me there. What fans did is way fucking worse and just crazy.
Amazing, i thought that was one of the weakest video for actually getting through to backers some of the issues with the project.
peter gabriel
The problem Sandi has is she very blatantly used Star Citizen as a way to get in front of cameras, then flaunted the ‘film roles’ she did manage to get and then got the fuuuuck away from the nerds as quickly as possible and vanished as soon as she was finished with them and didn’t need the project anymore, in such an in your face way you’d have to be even dumber than Tojal not to notice it.
Amongst a few other really excellent slight of hand things she’s done. I have always been on Team Sandi and still am, she fuckin rocks.
Beet Wagon
Closing /r/dereksmart was a mistake
Scruffpuff
There’s a clip in the latest Bootcha vid where she’s doing some kind of bizarre hula dance and holy shit, this was years and years ago and she looks miserable as shit, she’s hardly moving, has a huge frown, and is just looking around the set disinterestedly like she took the job at gunpoint. I guess she figured it was too much a bit part for someone of such exceptional talent - she should be able to show no ability at all and just be given the best positions and hundreds of millions of dollars for free! It’s gotta kill her that her husband managed to do exactly that.
Goddamn the top comment is already saying “She got the company $200M, of course she’s doing a great job “
he use facts to spread his negative views on this great project, this is the worse kind of fake news
TheAgent
I’ll be onsite and completely fucking drunk (but v respectful) during space court
gonna livetweet me a fucking crobear quote
Sarsapariller
In other other news, the estimates we made earlier about a player having to hand-pick literally thousands and thousands of cave-mined minerals before they can buy the basic economic unit of one starter ship appears to be true.
It’s one of my favorite things about the game-as-it-exists. In any other game 33,000 “Credits” or whatever would be a nice haul. In Star Citizen it’s fucking nothing, because the prices for the most basic ships start around 300k, and swiftly climb into the tens of millions. None of the game rewards will ever be realistically achievable with in-game activities and it’s so weird that the fans don’t care.
made the mistake of trying out star citizen to see how far along it was (not very) and after being frustrated with how long it takes going from one place to the other (like 40 minutes unless you’re a Big Bucks Spender with a big, fast ship) i had the even worse idea to share my frustrations in chat. people got really pissed off.
this sucks it’s really not fun but apparently it’s not meant to be “fun”?
Company raised a further £17m from a minority equity investment, the UK part of the $46M worldwide investment into the Cloud Imperium Group made in 2018.
Group turnover has increased in 2018 to £17.9m (2017: £16.96m)
Costs have also risen to £21.4m (2017: £18.2m)
Accounting profit is different to cash flow, it should reflect a true trading position accounting for timing differences.
However, in this case we have no idea if the dollar amounts that are transferred to the UK are a true reflection of the share of global ship sales/subscriptions or not. So since revenue is really just a reflection of how much money was transferred to the UK in order to pay bills as they become due, you cannot really say much about the UK trading position or profits as a whole.
Accounting ahead:
What happens is something like this. You’re in the UK and you spend £20m out of your bank to run a business. You get your funds from the USA of dollars transferred and converted to £20m and that’s it. Then 10 months after the year end your accountant goes through and prepares the accounts. Say you spent £1m on fixed assets, well that comes out of the profit and loss account and is replaced with a depreciation charge. Now your company has made a profit of £800k. Next your accountant says since you spent £20m of qualifying expenditure, you can get a tax credit of £4m. Now your company made a profit of £4.8m. And so on. So now your accounts will show, you made a profit of £4.8m and you have nothing in the bank, but you do have these assets on your balance sheet worth £4.8m that match your profits. While I have used rounded figures, this is literally what happened at CIG and lead to them restating earlier figures.
Because the amounts transferred from the US to the UK are just a balancing figure to pay bills as they become due, the difference between accounting income and accounting expenditure does not mean much when taken in isolation.
A small question about the game. Does it require a mouse?
no, only a creditcard
A run of bad ships might trigger an unforced error or two that turns out to be what finally sends whales diving for the exits, but one or even two bad ship sales in a row won’t stop the dream. We’ve seen before that it takes a direct, un-ignorable attack on a whale’s personal dreams to snap them out of it. You have to specifically undercut their belief that one day they’ll be lording it over the unwashed masses in their space yacht.
That’s why CIG never touches the spaceships once the sale is over. Messing with the specifications is incredibly dangerous. Look what happened with the missing seat in the alien bubble-fighter - the biggest uprising the backers have ever had, and all over whether an obscure and expensive fightercraft was single or two-seater.
In Star Marine’s Demien Comms enemy indicators can sometimes be seen through walls.
There’s a chance a vehicle will become unresponsive after quantum travel.
CRU-L5 is obstructed from most directions.
The Freelancer MIS bounces on the pad when spawned.
Darneely uses the wrong audio dialogue when offering a mission.
NPC beacons will sometimes display an incorrect distance.
Players can not complete the Clovus downed satellite counter measure after killing the opposing player when they are in possession of the computer blade.
“Maintenance” mission objective boxes vanish when they are picked up and dropped.
The video feed for ATC is currently blank.
AI ships traveling along a route will often get stuck.
Attempting to quantum travel to destinations from orbit of ArcCorp or its moons may result in the player colliding with the surface.
Ships can spin excessively out of control when their wing is clipped.
Landing illegally and having your ship despawn while a mission box is inside will break mission progress.
Players in the same ship may see the ship in different locations.
The textures on the Reclaimer’s main turret are incorrect.
There’s a large rectangular area missing from the surface of Daymar around one of the caves.
Multiple scope crosshairs are off center when viewed in ADS.
Corpses at derelicts are hidden under objects or hull.
Players may crash when loading into the industrial hangar.
Players may crash when changing hair back to original when using the character customizer.
Ships may display as rented if the player exits to title while a claim is in progress.
The reformation distortion scattergun currently has a blue light texture issue.
The default hair may be present under other hairstyles.
Sarsapariller
Interesting how many features they’re focusing on seem to be around the spaceman, on foot, picking up or putting down simple objects. It’s like they just finally figured out pick-up-and-put-down-simple-object technologies, in the same way they finally figured out planet-map technologies a couple years ago, so now they’re going all-in on throwing as many pick-up mechanics at the wall as possible without any real theory of an overarching game design. Love to fly my faster-than-light starship down to planets to scoop literal shit out of caves for pennies.
Scruffpuff
it’s what they’ve been doing for the last 8 years. Promise everything, finally more or less figure out a bog-standard tech, get it mostly working, redesign entire focus of game around the single semi-working tech. Get backers to laser-focus on that aspect. Sell them on the idea that the game is so deep that picking up shit in a cave is proof that the larger design is so awesome and complete that they’re down to these kinds of details now. Picking up cave-bat shit is what you do to kill time between huge space fleet battles, PVP fighting deadlier than COD, and massive ground warfare. Basically the triple-finale of Return of the Jedi. That would tire anyone out, so collect cave shit for a while to remind yourself how deep the game is!*
*Entire game may not exist.
“More importantly, a cave has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a gamer (gamer: non-star citizen) discovers that a game has caves, he will automatically assume the game is also in possession of game-play loops, balance, coherent systems, tin of biscuits, actual flight model, compass, map, giant space worms, space news vans, economy, space suits etc., etc. Furthermore, the gamer will then happily believe that any of these or a dozen other items actually exist that the developer might accidentally have “refactored”. What the gamer will think is that any developer who can show off caves the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his cave is is clearly a developer to be reckoned with.”
There was not a CtD, error codes (e.g., 30k) and no crashhandler popup. What I do see is in the game log (I XXXXXXX'd out the username):
<16:30:44> Game mode destroyed
<16:30:45> CGameClientChannel::OnDisconnect channel_id=991 account_id=0 username="" nickname="" displayname="" cause=17 reason="User left the game"
The year was 2057, long after the second war of the JPEGs had concluded. Now, the darkest corners of the Earth were the only places where the last bastions of mankind survived.
In the cold and damp places, lit only by flickering neon and florescent lights, humanity had been reduced to a race of scavengers. Some hunted for food, some for potable water, but the true prize - and universal currency of the lingering, damned souls - were the surviving thumb drives. Loaded up with their precious cargo, the peasant class traded these drives for the necessities of their survival, while the affluent enjoyed their content on the few surviving computers that had been cobbled together from parts. There were not many that survived the numerous EMPs that had been fired, in the goal of wiping out the JPEGs forever.
In their warm yet ramshackle huts, the privileged sipped on the nauseating fluid that had been concocted from fermenting mushrooms, and endlessly theorycrafted about the amazing things that could have been. “Star Citizen had almost entered the beta state in 2043!”, they lamented, weeping as they pawed at the precious images, “There were almost 5 gameplay loops in a phase 0 implementation!” The peasantry listened to the wailing and anger emerging from the crude structures and cursed their poor decisions… had they only invested properly, they too could have been living lives of relative luxury. Instead, they retired to their sleeping sacks on the cold cavern floor, and prepared for the next perilous trips deep into the scorched hellscape of their fallen world to seek out the elusive remaining JPEGs.
“They didn’t get rid of Ben”
I still don’t know why people keep saying this.
Ben very pointedly hasn’t publicly acknowledged the company’s existence since his wife quit and they moved over a year ago. He used to post several times a day about SC on Twitter . He never posts on the forums. He attends no events (which would be a key part of his supposed current job title). He has never been mentioned by any CIG staff in any way since he moved.
The only indication that Ben is in any way, shape, or form involved with CIG is his name at the top of Jumppoint, which honestly considering all the evidence is more likely a legacy edit they haven’t bothered changing yet.
He no longer works there. Its clear he was fired/laid off and made to sign an NDA to never talk about the company as part of severence.
Chris Roberts is now worth over 30m USD, excluding any shares or valuations of CIG
this makes him the richest crowd funded CEO ever, and “the highest paid games CEO that hasn’t released a product”
Sandi Roberts has invested in or opened her own production studio (couldn’t get a biz name so ???)
it supposedly aims to “produce and distribute films in touch with modern events, including feminist, LGTBQ and gender issues”
Erin Roberts now worth upwards of 10m USD
massive payouts to Roberts family and top execs occurred simultaneously with “several large investments” in 2017, 2018 and June 2019
Chris recently re-upped contract with close partners and family members (???)
“abysmal” working conditions continue, but with no end in sight for the crunch
“These are their lives. They are going to spend the majority of their twenties working 60 and 70 hour weeks, just so executives can hit their bonuses. I cannot be more disgusted with how our crunch is handled.”
turnover continues at a rapid pace: “We need developers fucking like rabbits and producing happy, subservient baby developers to keep up with everyone getting the fuck out.”
special parties, bonuses or vacations given to certain employees (no reasons given): “It has caused a huge rift; there is an enormous amounts of backstabbing and bus-throwing to get that prize.”
and well, this: “Shut the fuck up, Jared. We are unprepared? We are unprofessional? How you’ve managed to hold on to your job has to be some sort of devil’s bargain. The pained groans that come from realising we are scheduled to appear with you are matched only by torture and child birth. PLEASE get the fuck out and find a job you can handle without trying to fuck over everyone more competent than you.”
TheAgent
hello part 2 (from someone waaaaay different)
internal planet build of Earth has taken thousands of man hours but “worth it”
land claims first to debut in the Sol/Home/Domus system: “Stake your claim on Earth, the moon, Mars and beyond.”
prices for land claims will increase “massively”
build fortified bunkers, farms, population towers, player usable banks/stores and planetary defenses
“It isn’t ready, but it will be ready very quickly after we show it. This groundwork is half a decade in development.”
player controlled orbiting rest stops, cafes (the fuck), fueling stations and defense platforms all planned for sale
“Chris wanted something never seen before and that’s an Earth that is completely open to exploration.”
“As we strive for realism and fidelity, these parcels of land will eventually be worth much more than their cost.”
Sarsapariller
Lol they really did forget about the space game didn’t they
Oh god I hope this is all true, and is shown off in a flashy demo at CitCon. The Citizenry would go ape shit and literally throw their money at the Crobbler’s feet. Spectacular new heights of whale milking is one of my few remaining wishes for this mess.
But I just find it hard to believe that they really have anything in the tank (no matter how unfinished/broken), other than the pathetic “progress” like a new hair pipeline that they’ve been showing in their videos all year. They have been hunkered down in survival/expectation management mode. To come out swinging like this with Chris’ old scope busting swagger would be a massive change in direction.
Starting to work through the accounts and seeing the most basic mistakes all over the place that are sometimes awkward to decypher so I decided to go with something easy that shouldn’t need explanation. Employee numbers and salaries. I learned something about addition development. See if you can spot the copy/paste seam in these accounts. I’ve put a big red circle around it to save time.
While I was tempted to say £5.9m for every year, the data is:
2018 - 338 employees, total £16.9m, 50k average including employer NIC
2017 - 318 employees, total £14m, 44k average including employer NIC
2016 - 221 employees, total £9.9m, 44.8k average including employer NIC
I feel so incredibly lucky to work with so many talented individuals. I have had the luxury of working on the massive project that is called Star Citizen as the Concierge Program Manager. This project, which I still very much believe in, is something truly unique. The friends and acquaintances I have made are something I will cherish forever.
I have decided to work on a personal passion project and step away from the company earlier this month.
It’s been an honor serving such an amazing player base. I hope to see you all in the verse.
Out respect to my peers and the company I worked for, I will not be entertaining any questions.
I think that “Out respect to my peers and the company I worked for, I will not be entertaining any questions” reads as “I got paid hush money to not slag off my old employer so they can continue scam you guys. Sorry.”
To fix getting stuck in a cave, idle for roughly 20-30 mins and it’ll kick you from the server for being AFK but retain your gems and items.
Star Citizen: Workaround - Idle for 20-30 minutes and get kicked off the server
“
